Cate Gardner's Blog, page 37

Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman

A one sentence review of Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman would be...

A fekking brilliant short story collection. 


A two sentence review would look like this...

A fekking brilliant short story collection. Or to put it eloquently - bloody marvellous. 


And a slightly longer review...

I loved this book so much. I never re-read short stories or books, at least not since I was a kid, because there are so many books in my to read pile, and so many books I need to buy, and so many stories online, but I've found myself picking up Tiny Deaths again and again and trying to examine its brilliance.

The thing that stood out for me was the characterisation, sure the stories were weird and brilliant (but I read lots of weird, brilliant stories and write lots of weird stories), but the author had a knack of making me care about the protagonists and antagonists almost immediately, like within a paragraph. A damn paragraph and I'm already rooting for them. Now that's talent. He even made me love Hitler's dog.

Yeah, that's right, Hitler's dog.

Favourite stories were Mortal Coil, Perfect, Ashes to Ash, Stuff We Leave Behind, Favourite and Tiny Deaths. The book shall be leaving my greasy hands tomorrow because I need to pass on its magic. I suspect it's travelling to a worthy home. Of course, that's if I remember to put it in my bag.

Includes Luggage Tag

Mark West has made a trailer for my forthcoming chapbook, Nowhere Hall...



...I heart modern technology.

And Mark has also added Nowhere Hall to Goodreads. Excellent.

A Barbed Wire Hearts Cover

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This is the cover of my novella forthcoming this November from Delirium Books
I think I'm in love.
The artist is Gak.
Oh my![image error]

WIP Wednesday - Are you done, Kathleen Fair?

Or maybe that should be titled, 'There's so much missing here, Kathleen Fair'.

The novellette/novella is complete at 14,537 words. Hearts, men and mirrors have broken, but fair Kathleen is the most lost of all.

Now to let it stew while I contemplate what happens in the bits between the bits or decide to lob off other bits.

The above was achieved with a little help from my friend, Freedom. Dude is a pain in the ass at times with his tough love, but in the end, when the universe restores, I appreciate his tenacity.

Goodreads - How do you score?

I'm a fan of Goodreads - you can find me here.

Goodreads is a great place to get exposure for your books by way of competitions and also to find new books to read. Although, it might be an idea to stay away from the Never-Ending Book Quiz because it quite frankly, never ends. So far I've answered 1448 questions (how sad is that). Anyway, this blog post isn't about time wasting quizzes or discovering what an extraordinary guesser you are, it's about how you score books on Goodreads.

I personally follow Goodreads own markers for each star ie

★  didn't like it
★★  it was okay
★★★  liked it
★★★★ really liked it
★★★★★ it was amazing

...seems sensible to me. When I'm considering buying a book, I tend to check the reviews on Goodreads rather than Amazon, first off checking if any of my friends have read it and what they thought, and I'm constantly surprised by potential readers comments to three star reviews (and I'm not talking about anyone who visits here - that I'm aware of :D), alot of folk seem to think a three star review means the book isn't worth picking up. In my world it is. It means I liked it. Sure, I'm not going to rave about the book like I would a book I awarded five stars too, but hell, I'd sure pick up the author's next book or something from their back catalogue.

Actually, I'm likely to pick up another book from an author whose book I only gave 2 stars too because I rarely like everything an author has written ie I gave Stephen King's Desperation ★★★★★ and Dreamcatcher ★.

So, I was curious, how do you score?

And in other news, another fabulous review of Strange Men has appeared online, this time in Morpheus Tales and by Brett Taylor. Here's an extract (you'll can read the full review over at Morpheus Tales - page 9.

So who is Cate Gardner? A dotty eccentric of the English countryside, roaming the garden in search of fairies and magic moths? Or only a clever young lady amusing herself with her flights of fancy? Either way, Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits and Other Curious Things is worth a look. It shows mixing whimsy and the bizarre can be a higher art than just rewriting old classics with zombie jokes.

Did you notice the word young?

Full Fathom Forty

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My 1920s New York set weird fantasy House of Snowflakes has been accepted by David J Howe for the British Fantasy Society's 40th Anniversary anthology Full Fathom Forty. The anthology will be launched at Fantasycon this September.

Two acceptances in one week. I think I like this summer.

In other news, my lawnmower almost blew up and (it gets worse) I still had to do the garden using our rickety old lawnmower.[image error]

WIP Wednesday - The Freedom of Kathleen Fair

On Monday, I discovered Freedom. Or rather, on Monday, I was brave enough or perhaps tired enough to finally download Freedom. For the uninitiated, Freedom is a computer program that blocks the internet and the only way to override the program is to switch off your computer and restart it (and I'm far too lazy to do that). You can set it for between 15 mins and 8 hours. So far I've set it twice for two hours, although I might go for four or five hours this weekend, and it works a treat. Both days I wrote a little over 2000 words in two hours; I don't think I've done that in years, at least not regularly. Of course, I shouldn't really tempt fate before I've tested it for a month or so, but so far...

...Fan*blinkin*tastic. I might conquer the world after all, or at least my 'to write' projects.

Thus, I am 5034 words into The Broken Birdcage of Kathleen Fair. So far the story has spun a web of gargantuan furniture, mirrors, Hellish graffiti, Perfume, a dead boy, and a girl who was supposed to be meek and mild yet somehow barraged into the story with her fists raised.

The manuscript currently hovers around the line: You should have run, Kathleen Fair.

In other exciting news, Daily Science Fiction have accepted my story Exit Stage Life. For a moment, I thought I might have amassed enough pro-pay wordage sales to upgrade my HWA membership to Active, but by my rough calculations I'm still about 300 words short. You need three pro-rate stories published amounting to 7500 words, and I have five pro-rate with about 7200 words. Damn my brevity.

Call Me Narcissus

I am so in love with the title of my new story that I can't stop whispering it. This of course does not make for a productive writer, thus I am currently 654 words into In the Broken Birdcage of Kathleen Fair. I couldn't get the story plan to sit right until I found my main character's name, we ran the gamut from Gina to Erica to Erin (okay, not much of a gamut), but none of them fitted and then we came upon the name Kathleen and she is of course very, very fair.

In other news, I may just, eventually, maybe, you never know sit down and finish my ghostly time travel saga 'The Ghosts of Folding Time' which I started writing last November. I mean, we have an entire first draft and part of a second draft and a whole heap of madness. And then of course there are a bunch of grandfathers to deal with. In the meantime though, I should head downstairs and continue babysitting and watching Alvin and the Chipmunks for the hundredth time this weekend.

The Pinstripe Interview

Angela Slatter, author of The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories and Black-Winged Angels has interviewed me over at her blog today for one of her infamous drive-by interviews.

You can also read her other drive-by interviews here with folk such as John Connolly, Cherie Priest, Catherynne M Valente, Simon Marshall Jones, Amanda Pillar, Nick Gevers, Lavie Tidhar, and many other awesome people.

A Post of Many Things

I knew the people I followed and interacted with on Twitter were several shades of awesome, but they shone last night throwing a myriad of marvellous advice at this technophobic idiot. I'd downloaded the edits for Nowhere Hall and spent the day commenting on the editor's changes and saying what I agreed with, what I didn't agree with and changing things, then I closed the file and went to email it to the editor. Only wait, I couldn't find the file. I'd saved to the downloaded file rather than creating my own file in Word and my computer swallowed it into its nether regions never to be seen again. Serious panic attack until I gave up the hunt and decided to re-do the edits today. Thankfully, I remembered most of my comments and felt doubly sure about them after a sleep.

Aaron Polson announced yesterday that Amazon had made his book 'We are the Monsters' available for free and that he'd had over 6,000 downloads since. Although, I'd much prefer he was making loads of cash, I know that readers are Aaron's number one priority, so if you haven't previously read any of his work, now would be an excellent time to discover him.

And over at the Fae Awareness site (run by KV Taylor and Mark Deniz) they are running a competition in which you can win a chapbook. The competition is only open for a couple more hours and the link is here... And don't forget there's still plenty of time to enter my Spectral Press competition.